Kigali: Columbian researcher Samuel K. Sia has developed a small and cheap plastic chip that can reliably diagnose HIV and syphilis within about 15 minutes, already tested in Rwanda the chip could make testing in remote villages a possibility.
The “mChip”, a credit-card-sized piece of plastic that is produced using a plastic injection molding process was designed to be used in resource-poor settings. Field tests in Rwanda showed that the chip works as well as traditional laboratory-based HIV diagnostics.
According to results published in the Nature Medicine, the chip detects 100 per cent of cases when used to test HIV or syphilis and HIV together, with a 4 to 6 per cent false positive rate. The device is estimated to cost $1 (600 Rwandan francs).
Rwandan health officials facilitated the testing of the device in the country with the help of Columbia’s School of Public Health and nongovernmental health organizations.
Researcher Sia and team now hope to use the chip to test pregnant women in Rwanda for HIV and other STDs. “If you catch the diseases in mothers, you can prevent transmission to newborns, increasing clinical impact,” said Sia.
“When you’re in these villages, you may have the drugs for many STDs, but you don’t know who to give treatments to, so the challenge really comes down to diagnostics,” Sia explained in a statement. “Syphilis testing in mothers and pregnant women could reduce the number of years lost due to ill health, disability, or early death by 200,000, in Rwanda.
In remote areas in Rwanda testing for HIV takes time since many clinics and hospitals have to send out blood samples to a national lab.
ARI/RNA
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